The Line Through the Corner

Five photographs of the sky, each subtracted from its own reflection. Reflect a frame about the diagonal that runs from one corner to the other, and subtract the reflection from the original. Wherever the mirror gave the field back exactly, the two cancel and nothing sounds. Everything you hear is what it failed to return. The series is named for the part you cannot hear. The Cosmic Cliffs first, then a planetary nebula that really is round and is audibly quieter for it, then five galaxies scattered off the diagonal that never stop, then the first deep field, then one very large mosaic. Four of the five are as far from symmetric as a random field would be. Knowing that ordinary case is ordinary took eighty-nine measurements before a note was rendered. Source: JWST NIRCam imaging, Early Release Observations (programs 2731, 2732, 2733, 2736) and program 1328. Source data: public JWST observations obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute, operated by AURA under NASA contract NAS 5-03127. Programs #1191, #1257, #1328, #1621, #2457, #2484, #2727, #2731, #2732, #2733, #2736, #2926, #4426, #4523, #4528, #5086, #5883. We acknowledge the teams led by Lee Armus (#1328) and Roberto Maiolino (#4426) for developing their observing programs with a zero-exclusive-access period. Observation identifiers are given above. Audio © 2026 Far Wide Radio — licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. All artwork by Elliot Fairbanks Junior. Archived and citable: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21693766 Series 2 contains material from the DESI Early Data Release (DESI Collaboration et al. 2024), used under CC BY 4.0. Full citation, acknowledgement and data credits: radio.enthropysystems.com/pages/attribution Series 2 is archived and citable: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21995512